Inadvisable—much of wood itself (not the bark, the structural stuff underneath) is dead at functional maturity. Trees are just skin and bones! (And plumbing. And really crazy hair. And roots. And sometimes genitals.)

All those genes make humans look like flunkies. And knowing a tiny bit about Darwin maybe we could take into account that a pine tree can easily outlive any human ever born. And pine trees tend to have a very long history of reproduction compared to humans. So maybe all the thinking, feeling and running about that humans do is simply proof of our inferiority. think about it. The pine tree needs water, sunshine, a few minerals and an atmosphere and that is about it. Humans need all kinds of things. I've never seen a tree shoot anyone, go mental, or rape other trees. Trees might enjoy making humans feel like idiots.

While the set of large-genomed organisms does include some very sophisticated trees and flowers, it also includes several species of amoeba... so I wouldn't panic just yet.

All a big genome really means for certain is that you're good enough at finding food that you can support it. The substance is a lot more important—some species of shrimp, for example, have 88 or 92 chromosomes, but they're mostly redundant duplicates. Wheat has five copies of every chromosome, too.

Plants tend to have large genomes because they reproduce so rapidly—a field of corn has enough offspring every season to mutate every nucleotide in the whole kit and kaboodle at least once, and because they have very static, slow existences, they can afford to tune themselves very well to their environments. That's what the genes and duplicates are for—giving the plant very fine-grained control over things like how it prepares for the next season based on the weather from the last one.

You're right, it's not an entirely ubiquitous phenomenon. But amongst the plants that do have large, repetitive genomes, fine-grained epigenetics and averaged-out mutations tend to be the primary benefits, IIRC.

Plants also have the advantage of being able to survive errors (or maybe "excursions"?) of miosis more often - polyploid mammals typically will spontaneously abort, but polyploid plants often become important to humans. Bread wheat and spelt are hexaploid because humans bred them that way millenia ago. The current record holder for largest genome, Paris Japonica, is huge only because it's octaploid. The loblolly gets props for having a big genome while being merely diploid.

If you want to assign bonus points for low-effort existence, how about viruses? It's a matter of some ambiguity whether they even bother to be alive; but that hardly stops them from being mind bogglingly numerous and found basically wherever there are hosts available.

All those genes make humans look like flunkies. And knowing a tiny bit about Darwin maybe we could take into account that a pine tree can easily outlive any human ever born. And pine trees tend to have a very long history of reproduction compared to humans. So maybe all the thinking, feeling and running about that humans do is simply proof of our inferiority. think about it. The pine tree needs water, sunshine, a few minerals and an atmosphere and that is about it. Humans need all kinds of things. I've never seen a tree shoot anyone, go mental, or rape other trees. Trees might enjoy making humans feel like idiots.

Plants often have large genomes. One reason I've heard for this is that plants can't move, so they're much more exposed to the environment. As a result, they need a more diverse array of biochemical responses to stressors.

Again, what relevance does this have? My barber has been cutting my hair for 20 years, but I don't think he has much insight into my genome. I could be wrong about him. Our discussions typically don't get around to molecular biology in the 15 minutes I'm on the chair, but maybe he's more like Johnny the Snitch from the Police Squad shows than I realize.

Genome sizes can drift in either direction over time(or just sort of wander), though, so finding a radically pruned minimum-functional-genome would also be a possible consequence of a long evolutionary history. Redundancy is nice; but DNA synthesis isn't metabolically free.

Why is this modded up? First it is wrong even on the surface. Chordates (the phylum containing humans) first appeared around 550 million years ago. Conifers (the division -- plant equivalent of phylum -- containing pines) first appeared around 300 million years ago. Second, even trees and humans are descended from a single common ancestor, so how can trees be "evolutionarily" older than humans? Third, more time does not equal bigger genome. Genomes can shrink over time. This has happened in many species of yeast and bacteria, as smaller genomes allow them to replicate faster. Even macroscopic organisms such as birds have had their genomes shrink over time.

If anything, it makes sense to count how long a species has been evolving in terms of generations, not years. Most conifers have a longer time between generations than humans, so they have fewer evolutionary intervals than humans. I don't even know how you could get an average of how long a generation is for the human evolutionary history, back to tree shrews or even to the first chordates - how could we calculate the total number of evolutionary steps our ancestors made and compare this to a pine tree's an

Yeast and bacteria are single celled organisms. For them, reproducing means undergoing cell division (mitosis), and the single longest step of the preparation for mitosis is synthesizing a new copy of the DNA. I don't know the specifics of how bigger genomes make plants reproduce more quickly, but I can at least say that for large, multicellular organisms like plants and animals the rate limiting step in reproduction is not cell division. In animals, for example, a lot of the "waiting time" for gestation in

More like the pine trees don't understand their genome properly, so they do a copy/paste before applying a mutation. They'd be less reluctant to refactor it in-place if only compilation didn't take so long.

63x total coverage with from Illumina hardware using a mixture of paired-end libraries, ranging from 200 bp to a whopping 40 Kbp. I'm pretty sure that's sufficient information to estimate the number of large-scale repetitions. Sequencing projects of species for which there is no good relative to scaffold against are typically much more rigorous than what you'd see in cancer research.

Well they do have a draft genome, not a "complete" one. A complete genome is really hard to generate, and doesn't really gain you a whole lot for all your effort for more complex organisms. Also, its not fair to compare cancer research, as they already have one of the best genomes sequenced to refer too, the human genome. Creating a new genome, de novo, is hard, and 63x is a good start, but not nearly enough.

Also, why did they just use Illumina? Yes it's nice they had multiple paired end ranges, but Illumin

The hardware platform of choice is a matter of availability. Here [omicsmaps.com] is a map of where most/all of the NGS platforms are in the world; Illumina sequencers are the most common amongst the newer systems.

One, that map is incomplete. Second, there are plenty of facilities, even if not as numerous, that can do other sequencing. As long as the assembly techniques support combining multiple sequencing technologies together, you should in order to call upon each's strength.

For example, look at the All Paths assembler that recommends adding in a touch of PacBio to connect scaffolds together.

That's the largest genome that's been fully sequenced, not the largest genome known. See Comparison of different genome sizes. [wikipedia.org] Genome sizes for plants vary over a huge range, and aren't closely related to organism complexity. The largest genome known is for an amoeboid.

When I look at that list, I start to think that "living fossils" have large repetitive genomes. I looked up an article on the mitochondrial genome of the chambered nautilus, and I got the impression that more than anticipated repetition was found.

When I look at that list, I start to think that "living fossils" have large repetitive genomes. I looked up an article on the mitochondrial genome of the chambered nautilus, and I got the impression that more than anticipated repetition was found.

Genome annotation (finding all the interest features in the sequence) is really computationally intensive, due in large part to the number of separate (often sub-optimally written) algorithms that have to be chained together and interpreted. My team at the iPlant Collaborative [iplantcollaborative.org] worked with the authors of a popular open-source annotation tool called "MAKER" to get it running at scale on the 302 TFLOP Lonestar 4 [utexas.edu] supercomputer, which in turn was used by the pine team to do in a few hours what used to be 6 month